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Comment by Syzygies | Hacker News Reader

I grew up with no choice in this matter. Then there was a period when "touch" dialing was available for an exhorbitant premium.

There's something so Brooklyn / Portland about wanting to relive this for the romance. It sucked.

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As a kid, I always had this fear that if I had to dial 0 and I waited too long before the next digit, the operator would be summoned to the line. Waiting for that 0 to finish its long turn was stressful.

In the 90s there was a charge on my mom's phone bill for touch tone dialing. I called up to dispute the charges but the phone company wouldn't have any of it so I had them remove the "service" and they warned me that she wouldn't be able to dial out any more. I flipped a switch on her phone to simulate pulse dialing and a few months later switched it back. She was never charged again.

That pulse switch always felt so strange to me. It was the Rosetta of POTS.

I remember growing up our family got an extra phone we could use in the basement (I think it came with a magazine subscription oddly) . It had the keypad, but would just generate the pulses like a rotary phone. Very slow and felt wrong. I’m pretty sure this phone didn’t have the switch to go into “tone” dialing mode like our other phones which were only tone.

it wasn't the famous "sports illustrated" sneaker phone which some versions had the pulse/tone switch (see photos of 2 different sole keypads) .

https://oldphoneworks.com/products/the-sports-illustrated-te...

I don't remember the sneaker phone, but I do remember the football phone:

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-sports/the-funk...

I didn’t remember that one, pretty fun. I do remember the “nfl follies” game blooper vhs tape. Was pretty funny. I can’t imagine them doing another one.

For me it is a lot about the noise and feeling of the dial, I get satisfaction out of them. Can you expand on Brooklyn/Portland? Is that hipster or something? I can imagine it did suck to _actually_ use, the faster 20pps dials feel quite a lot faster.

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